Former security director blasts OLPC, suggests new strategy

Former OLPC security directory Ivan Krstic has written a lengthy essay …

Former One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) security director Ivan Krsti? is mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore. He opened up a massive can of damning allegations about OLPC earlier this week in a lengthy tirade on his personal blog. The blog post includes a deeply pessimistic appraisal of constructionist learning theories and some harsh words for OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte, but it also offers some valid and insightful observations about the project's failings and what can be done to remedy them.

Krsti?'s blog post is like an angry rant from one who has escaped from a sinking ship and is now shouting from the shoreline in a futile effort to get the ship's crew to patch holes in the hull and change course. Despite the extremely caustic tone and occasionally contradictory arguments in the blog post, those of us who have been following OLPC from the start and have seen the litany of problems and failures from a safe distance can sympathize with his frustration.

The OLPC project aimed to produce low-cost, education-focused laptops to sell in large quantities to governments in developing countries. The OLPC XO laptop includes some unique and innovative hardware components and a Linux-based, open source software platform that was designed to promote a constructionist approach to education. OLPC has faced a steady stream of serious problems that have left the project on life support.

The price of the laptop has climbed to $188 per unit as a result of hardware changes and insufficient sales volume. In order to help account for slow sales, OLPC made the XO available in North America through the Give 1 Get 1 program (G1G1), which failed catastrophically as a result of egregiously mismanaged deployment. A growing number of users who received units through G1G1 have experienced hardware failures and a number of other problems. OLPC's attempt to reorganize and make the project "more like Microsoft" was a complete bust too, and compelled Krsti? and others to leave the project.

The chief's failings

Krsti? begins by providing some historical insight into Negroponte's previous failures in this area. He points to a pilot program launched by Negroponte and education theorist Seymour Papert in 1982 with the sponsorship of the French government. The program assembled a computing center in Senegal that planned to use Apple II computers and the LOGO programming language to instruct children. Although Negroponte and OLPC have touted the Senegal experiment as proof that children in developing countries can learn with computers, Kristc points out a 1983 article in the MIT Technology Review revealed that the pilot was actually an abysmal failure. Papert and Negroponte had fled within a year because the entire undertaking had "become a battlefield, scarred by clashes of management, style, personality, and political conviction."

That description of the Senegal pilot's collapse has eerie parallels to the current friction within the OLPC project. Krsti? argues that there is no evidence to support the viability of OLPC's underlying strategy and that there are no previous programs or studies that validate constructionist learning outside of the domain of the ivory tower. "Nicholas' constructionism-based computer learning project in Senegal was a complete disaster: modulo commentary on the personalities and egos involved, it demonstrated nothing about anything," wrote Krsti?. "As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to 'decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget', he's talking about theory. He likes to mention Dakar, but doesn't like to mention how that pilot ended—or that no real facts about the validity of the approach came out of it."

The unexpectedly bittersweet taste of Sugar

Krsti? continues by accusing Negroponte of lying about his intention to port Sugar to Windows. Krsti? believes that the Sugar interface should be ported to as many operating systems as possible so that more users can benefit from it, but he fears that Negroponte will move to Windows exclusively and jettison the Sugar user interface.

"Nicholas knows quite well that Sugar won't magically become better simply by virtue of running on Windows rather than Linux. In reality, Nicholas wants to ship plain XP desktops. He's told me so. That he might possibly fund a Sugar effort to the side and pay lip service to the notion of its 'availability' as an option to purchasing countries is at best a tepid effort to avert a PR disaster," Krsti? wrote. "In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me—and not just me—that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there."

Kristc complains about some of the challenges imposed by the Linux operating system and argues at great length that the ability to modify the underlying platform is not an asset. But he abruptly reverses course and insists that "OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines," and has a responsibility to ship Linux because it "embodies the culture of learning that OLPC adheres to [and promotes a] culture of open inquiry, diverse cooperative work, [and] of freely doing and debugging." He also insists that using Windows on the XO "cripples the very hardware that supposedly set the project's laptops apart."

He generally supports porting Sugar to Windows because he wants existing Windows users to be able to adopt it. General ranting about platforms aside, that specific facet of his arguments makes a lot of sense. In his blog entry, he includes an excerpt of our recent interview with Trolltech CTO Benoit Schillings and points out that, like Trolltech's Qt port for Windows Mobile, porting Sugar to Windows would create a glide path that could ultimately help bring users to Linux.

Krsti? himself had attempted to advocate internally for increased Sugar modularity. He wanted to decouple the user interface from the underlying technologies and make the entire system inherently portable. The attempts made by him and others within the project to adopt that course of development were obstructed by Negroponte, who later had the gall to tell reporters that the Sugar system was weak because the components were too tightly coupled.

Infrastructure? What infrastructure?

Another revelation from Krsti?'s blog post is that OLPC has absolutely no deployment infrastructure in place to facilitate proper distribution of XO units. He says that this task was largely dumped on Walter Bender, who had no assistance and ultimately decided to leave because he felt that the program and his role in it were becoming a sham. This is perhaps the most problematic of OLPC's failures and it doesn't bode well for the future of the project. Krsti? recognized this, but he says that OLPC's leaders were largely unresponsive to his concerns.

"We have no real support infrastructure for these rollouts, our development process is not allocating any time for dealing with critical deployment issues that (will inevitably) come up, and we have no process for managing the crises that will ensue," he wrote in an internal memo last year.

Ultimately, he says that the project will be completely untenable unless the deployment issue is immediately addressed. "That OLPC was never serious about solving deployment, and that it seems to no longer be interested in even trying, is criminal. Left uncorrected, it will turn the project into a historical information technology fuckup unparalleled in scale."

The solution, says Krsti?, is to stop trying to make and ship the hardware. OLPC's presence in the market was enough to induce a whole slew of competitors to create competing commercial products. OLPC's new role could be providing hardware designs and educational software to governments and companies that want to create low-cost education laptops. OLPC could provide a wide range of consulting services and collaborate with third-parties to help them create products that are conducive to constructionist learning models.

Regardless of whether or not one agrees with the rest of his arguments, his final takeaway message has a lot of value. OLPC's dependence on scale for bringing costs down and inability to handle production and deployment issues are a clear sign that the project is better at creating than producing. OLPC can still make itself relevant by focusing on that strength instead of trying to build the complete widget. And they can leave the building to hardware companies like Asus and Intel that know how to build hardware.